Galileo's Daughter

About the Author

On this day, December 21, 1614, a Florentine priest from the church
of Santa Maria Novella took to his pulpit to denounce Italian
astronomer Galileo as one of the "enemies of true religion."
Galileo's crime: He dared to suggest that, based on what he could
see through his crude, homemade telescope, the earth was not at the
center of the solar system.

That discovery contradicted official teaching of the Catholic
Church and set off a contest between religion and science that
continues to this day.

Dava Sobel's best-selling book, Galileo's Daughter,
explores Galileo's scientific quest and his painful conflict with
religious dogma. Church inquisitors forced him to recant his views,
a reminder that Christian leaders often have betrayed their own
principles for dark and dubious reasons.

Nevertheless, this familiar story is more than a tale of church
politics run amok. Sobel's account rightly underscores Galileo's
own religious beliefs, and his lifelong struggle to hold on to
them. It will come as a surprise to some that Galileo saw no
conflict between the Bible and the discoveries of science. "Holy
Scripture and Nature," he declared, "are both emanations from the
divine word."

Lost in our contemporary debates over the Bible is the fact that
thinkers like Galileo strove to keep science a sacred study. Bacon,
Kepler, Copernicus, Pascal-most of the fathers of modern science
took the Bible seriously. Their belief in a rational Creator fired
their quest to make sense of the physical world. Their faith in God
as a Lawgiver guided their search for natural laws that governed
the universe. Isaac Newton never doubted that his discoveries
revealed God's handiwork. The universe, he reasoned, "could only
proceed from the counsel…of an intelligent and powerful
Being."

Too many skeptics have forgotten the massive historical debt
they owe to the Jewish and Christian belief in an orderly cosmos:
They cast religion as the enemy of science and progress, when in
fact it was a religious world view that helped launch the
scientific revolution over three centuries ago.

Science is surely a path to knowledge about the universe, but
not until recently did scientists hail it as the only path. True,
the idea that angels might make public-service announcements or
that God would appear in human disguise-to many it seems like the
stuff of supermarket tabloids. But as Galileo said in another
context, "Facts which at first seem improbable will…drop the
cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple
beauty."

Science may begin the task of pulling away that cloak, but
scientists do no injury to science if they sometimes-just
sometimes-allow faith to finish the job.

Joseph Loconte
is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at
the Heritage Foundation.